Pattern Recognition #246 - Card Advantage

Features Opinion Pattern Recognition

berryjon

7 July 2022

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Hello everyone! This is Pattern Recognition, TappedOut.Net's longest running article series as written by myself, berryjon. I am something of an Old Fogey who has been around the block quite a few times where Magic is concerned, as as such, I use this series to talk about the various aspects of this game, be it deck design, card construction, mechanics chat, in-universe characters and history. Or whatever happens to cross my mind this week. Please, feel free to dissent in the comments below the article, add suggestions or just plain correct me! I am a Smart Ass, so I can take it.

For yet another week in a row, my subject comes to use form TappedOut's Discord channel. Join it! It's fun! But I was asked to give what amounts to a Beginners Primer To Card Advantage. With a serious emphasis on Beginners, as I can tell you, this is a large subject, and very hard to unpack. You either summarize, or you get bogged down in the details.

So summarize it is.

There is no real way to describe Card Advantage in any single definitive measure. Sure, I'm sure that if you asked a hundred people, you'd get, like six different answers, but that's not the end of it, or rather it is the beginning. Just because I'm going to say something here does not make those other answers any less valid.

But I will start with a fundamental principle that underlies every facet of card advantage. Something that is so base-line to the game itself, that sometimes, we have to be reminded that it exists. Namely, that Mana is a Renewable Resource.

Unlike everything else I'm going to be talking about here, mana is a thing that comes back each turn (or when you cheat and uptap your sources for free on someone else's turn, like with Prophet of Kruphix). Mana is what you use to gain card advantage over every other resource in the game, so knowing how much you have, and when is vitally important. But it will always come back to you, unlike anything else. So knowing your mana base, your curve and what you need to do what you want will pay dividends in the long run. Don't neglect your mana!

Another thing to note, before I get into the thick of things, is the difference between temporary and permanent card advantage. For the most part, what I am going to describe for you today is in the latter camp, but it behooves me to also talk about temporary advantage. Let's start with the example of Light Up the Stage. This card allows you to exile the top two cards of your library and until the end of your next turn, you may play them. Please note that this is different than 'cast', as you cannot cast a land. Anyway, at the end of your next turn, those cards stay in exile, and you can no longer access them.

This is a form of temporary advantage, where you gain access to more, but for a limited time frame. Once that frame has passed, you are back to where you were before - minus the cards or other resources spend to get that advantage in the first place. You gain, but only for a short while. Make the best of it.

Now, on to other types of card advantage.

The first and more common example, the one that most people can understand with relative intuitiveness, literally the advantage of having more cards than your opponent does. More cards in hand, specifically. Card draw is an advantage, so much so that in a two player game, the person who goes first has the advantage of being able to try and set the tempo of the game, but at the same time, loses the advantage of having more cards. But this isn't always an advantage, for as I like to tell people when story time comes up, back in Ravnica/Time Spiral Standard, I had a Boros deck, and at one tournament, I went up against a Golgari mid-range deck. I quickly aggro my way through the first game, and then the opponent, for the second game, decides they want to draw first, rather than play first.

So naturally, round two goes much the same way as round 1. The advantage of drawing an extra card meant nothing when they surrendered initiative to a far faster deck. But on the other hand, there are plenty of decks that have no problem with that decision, and can compound that advantage further as the game progresses. Know your deck, and if you're going multiple rounds against the same deck, keep an open mind to deciding if you want to keep or lose that advantage.

But that's not the only form of card advantage, and this is where every colour except for shine. is the grand leader of the pack when it comes to simply drawing more cards. From Archivist to Blue Sun's Zenith, if you want to have more cards in your hand, then is the way to go.

Having more cards in hand means having more options. It means being able to pick and choose your responses and tailor them to the situation at hand, rather than depend on luck or the heart of the cards for an answer. And being able to maintain that sort of draw means that you can gain more and more advantage throughout the game - as long as you have plan or a contingency for all those cards. Don't run out, and you'll be fine!

This is also where my example of temporary advantage comes into play, where the 'pseudo draw' of gives them a temporary drawing in the same scale as , but at the cost of losing whatever they don't use.

But, on the other hand, you can also have an advantage by denying your opponent the same thing. A well timed Mind Rot can cut massively into a player's advantage, or even completely remove it entirely. Going from seven cards in hand to five can be painful, but going from 2 to 0? That's lethal, that's the complete destruction of the options that said player has, and the total removal of any advantage they might have had, or wanted to have.

So yes, Cards are Card advantage. Simple.

The next type of card advantage isn't really an obvious one, but it works as an enabler. That being, Mana Acceleration.

But not directly. I've talked about it in the past, and should do so again in the future. Rather, Mana acceleration is a form of card advantage in that you can play more cards by quantity and bigger cards by casting cost ahead of when you normally could. Old Fogeys like myself recognize that a turn 1 Birds of Paradise is one of the most dangerous plays in the game, almost as bad as a turn 1 Sol Ring. Why? A Birds that makes it to the next turn has two lands in play to help it, or rather, it helps them, and that means that you get a turn 3 play on turn 2.

Which can be a huge advantage in terms of what you can or cannot do.

Of course, like card draw, this can be temporary or permanent. Well, as permanent as any permanent can be. Sure. Sol Ring exists, but so does Dark Ritual or Rite of Flame. Sources of temporary mana that you can use to catapult you to an advantageous state.

And even them your sources of mana advantage don't have to disadvantage you in terms of card draw. Cards like Abundant Growth exist, though few in number, that replace themselves in your hand when you cast them. Sometimes, gaining an advantage means coming even.

But on the other hand, mana is something that is there to be used. If you're not using it, why are you doing the things you are doing? Yes, open mana is a threat. Just ask anyone who has had to play around someone who is sitting there with a hand full of cards and just sitting there. But when that person's turns around and it comes to their turn and they haven't spent that mana? That was wasted. That was an advantage was wasn't used, and an advantage that isn't used isn't an advantage.

Thirdly, we have Token Generation. Now, this isn't always as obvious as the physical cards in your hand, or the amount of mana you can throw into a spell - or spells - to overpower and overwhelm your enemies. Tokens are virtual cards. I can't stress this enough. Sure, when you open a pack, there's that token card at the back, but how many of you actually pay attention to them, aside from checking to see if you need them for your deck? I have over a full box of tokens and I barely look at them.

That tokens are, are value. Take, for example, Dragon Fodder. This is a single card that makes two 1/1 Goblin tokens. At Sorcery speed. That's it. It's simple, it's cheaper than spending to get two copies of Mon's Goblin Raiders into play as the mana is more flexible.

But you get two creatures for the price of a single card.

You get two effects for a single card used.

But it doesn't stop there. Look at one of 's best cards, and one of its biggest mistakes in the view of MaRo. Dawn of Hope. This is an enchantment that lets you pay to create a 1/1 Human Soldier with Lifelink. Oh, and it lets you pay to draw cards, but who cares about that?

This is token generation that is repeatable. You spent mana to put the card into play, and you can spend mana again and again to make more and more little soldiers. You gain advantage over time by spending a renewable resource for a material advantage. You gain an advantage in cards over time by not needing to use cards in hand to get an effect that is permanent - the tokens.

But you can also use this same effect to get a temporary advantage, but that's more for general abilities. Tokens are something material and can have a board presence, so I prefer to talk about them as a form of advantage. Think of it as amortization of your resources over time. Tokens stick around and you can get a pretty penny of them if you play your cards right.

Old person joke. Don't mind me.

Of course, this leads into a convergence of two concepts. Treasure. Temporary Token Mana, that once used, go away. You can make tokens and save them for later, gaining the benefits of both mana and tokens at the same time!

I like treasure, but even I think that it should be toned back a little. Kalain, Reclusive Painter is good because it encourages you to spend your resources in terms of both tokens and cards in hand, while Ziatora, the Incinerator sees it as just additional reward for killing something of yours that you probably wanted dead in the first place.

In the end, I can only say with certainty that Card Advantage is a matter of being efficient with your cards. It's easy to go for something big and splashy and get 13 bazillion tokens out with March of the Multitudes and call it card advantage, but is it so when your opponent then just plays Doomskar and wipes all your hard work away. Both cards generate their own advantage, but over committing is just as bad as not making enough effort.

Spending less resources than your opponents to get the same effect or even more is card advantage, just as spending the same resources to get more out of it is. Getting more cards in hand more effectively, making more mana, having more creatures on the board, these are all examples of Card Advantage. What you do with them is up to you though, and remember the important part of any advantage - if you don't use it, it might as well not exist.

Join me next week when I talk about something. What? I don't know yet.

Until then please consider donating to my Pattern Recognition Patreon. Yeah, I have a job, but more income is always better. I still have plans to do a audio Pattern Recognition at some point, or perhaps a Twitch stream. And you can bribe your way to the front of the line to have your questions, comments and observations answered!